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CIO Leigh Gavin: From working beginnings

Last month Chief Investment Officer Leigh Gavin sat down with Investment Magazine to chat about his role, the market and the outlook ahead.

Reflecting on his 17 years in the role, Mr Gavin pointed to an outlook for 2019 that is indeed “more challenging than usual”.

Leigh also looks back on the formation of LUCRF Super 40 years ago and the fund’s role as an industry pioneer. Many of the concepts embraced by LUCRF Super are now industry norms, but were not necessarily the case when Greg Sword established the fund in December 1978.

“Super belonging to the many, not a privileged few, was one of the founding tenets of LUCRF Super,” explains Mr Gavin. “That, as well as a guiding principle that LUCRF Super should be fully portable between jobs, something increasingly relevant with the rise of the gig economy.”

Chatting about how he came to LUCRF Super, Mr Gavin spoke about how his family background may have lead to a fund like LUCRF Super.

“She [Leigh's Grandmother] came out here in 1952 with my dad when he was 12,” he says. “She worked at the Heinz cannery factory in Dandenong all through the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s and into the ’80s, and Dad was a carpenter and cabinetmaker by trade."

“I think for a lot of investment personnel who work within industry funds, or work with industry funds, many of us are not third-generation stockbrokers."